Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday June 26, 2011 @11:27AM
from the less-unitary dept.

dkd903 writes "KDE 4.7 is almost here and brings along with it a number of features and performance improvements such as a better Dolphin with a faster file search, ability of KWin to run on Mobile devices, Grub2 integration in KDM and offline search support in the KDE virtual globe, Marble." Here's KDE's own announcement of the release candidate; the final release is planned for July 27. Reader jrepin quotes the KDE announcement: "With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing last-minute showstopper bugs and finishing translation and documentation that comes along with the releases."

This may devolve into a vi/emacs debate, but I'll ask anyways.
I'm running Ubuntu, and and quite happy with Gnome (having quickly borfed Unity). What could KDE offer that might convince me to try it out?

Well, we can argue better this and more refined that until we're blue in the face. Bottom line is that KDE offers a wholly-different perspective on what a Linux desktop user interface can do. Minimally, it's worth taking a look at, if only to broaden your horizons and solidify your preferences.

Personally, I find KDE to be a much more polished, integrated, and comprehensive suite than GNOME. It's snappy, sexy, and highly-configurable. In terms of appearance, KDE definitely has more of a stylistic Mac OSX-like approach and graphic set, though that's also highly-configurable. In fact, KDE's UI is so versatile that I could use KDE to recreate a default GNOME desktop without much effort. The applications tend to favor configurability over simplicity (which seems to be the opposite of much of GNOME's design choices). I can fine-tune most KDE applications to my personal, picky standards. Due to KDE4's kwin window manager rewrite, compositing (3D) effects are built into KDE's core, and are much more seamless than GNOME2's (although GNOME3 has followed suit).

Now, KDE has quite an advanced suite of applications that they bring to the table. However, keep in mind that almost every KDE application will run just fine under GNOME, and vice-versa. You can try almost any KDE application within GNOME should you find one you like (for example, I definitely prefer KDE's Konsole terminal over GNOME's gnome-terminal. The opposite is also true - any GNOME application will work just fine under KDE. You don't have to choose one over the other, though each is designed around and better-integrated with its native environment. Another winner is KDE's Amarok, which has long-held my personal favor as the best available audio player anywhere.

That said, I highly recommend giving it a shot. If you're using Ubuntu, you can try it with no risk by just installing the kubuntu-desktop and kde-full packages and choosing KDE as your window manager at login. It's worth a few days' trial to find out what you truly like.